As I wrote yesterday over at the EFC’s law and public policy blog, ActivateCFPL:

Joyce Arthur, executive director of the Abortion Rights Coalition of Canada, recently blasted media outlets for being too “balanced” in their coverage of Dr. Henry Morgentaler’s death by interviewing pro-life Canadians.

The pro-life perspective “is an extremist view,” not deserving of “legitimacy” and “does not deserve equal time or respect in Canada” railed Arthur in a recent Rabble.ca piece. According to Arthur, “naïve reporters” should not be interested in the pro-life expression of “concern for women’s well-being,” or the perspective that all human beings, including those at earlier stages of development, deserve human rights. […]

The accusation that the media was being too balanced in its coverage of Morgentaler’s death is a ridiculous claim. Even by Arthur’s own analysis of the media coverage, a significant number of stories – 37 per cent of those she reviewed – didn’t include interviews with pro-life Canadians. But if “extreme” or minority positions should be ignored by the media, than by her own standard, Arthur is the one who should be excluded from engaging with the media. Ever. Again.

In Arthur’s attempt to exclude pro-life Canadians from the media and the public square, she condemns herself to the same fate with her irrational and ridiculous standards.

The author of this Globe article argues that parents need to be far more thoughtful when they blog about their children. With the efficiency of archiving sites like the WayBackMachine, some things will never, ever disappear from the web.

Recently, The Atlantic ran an article by Phoebe Maltz Bovy on the plague of “parental overshare”: the reams of articles and blog posts by parents whose favourite, if not sole, subject is their kids. She cites a New York Times blog post by Beth Boyle Machlan about her daughter’s obsessive compulsive disorder in which she describes intimate details of a therapy session, and the recent controversy over “I Am Adam Lanza’s Mother,” a post-Newtown piece by a blogger named Liza Long who pegs her own troubled 13-year-old son as a potential mass murderer, illustrated by his photo. […]